If you're not paying for a product, the saying goes, then you're the product being sold.

Another way of saying this is that you and Google -- and you and Twitter, and you and Facebook -- do not enjoy an egalitarian relationship. The digital world, given its crazy capacity to scale, inverts the core, crusty logic of the consumer/producer relationship -- the customer is always right -- and turns it on its head. It puts the power almost singularly on the side of the product-providers.

For the most part, we consumers have very few modes of recourse when it comes to dealing with the companies that feed our digital addictions. It's either shut our accounts or shut our mouths. There aren't many options in between.

There may be a way to change that, though. In an essay in The Nation, the philosophy professor Evan Selinger and the legal scholars Ari Melber and Woodrow Hartzog make the case for re-imagining the digital contracts that govern our relationships with the companies that provide so many of our experiences of the Internet. A "People's Terms of Service," they argue, would attempt to reframe standardly opaque TOS agreements -- arrangements that often amount, the scholars say, to "contract abuse" -- in order to make them more equitable to consumers.

One thing a "People"s Terms of Service" would challenge is the Objective Theory of Contract, the doctrine that attempts to ignore the context in which contracts are negotiated and agreed upon. "The law currently protects one-sided contract arrangements," the authors write, "by assuming they were fairly negotiated, and thus reflect a 'meeting of the minds' by equal parties." Yet that assumption, in a world of boilerplate jargon and pages-long disquisitions, is no longer a fair one to make. "After all," they argue, "these contracts are usually created through user confusion and one-sided demands. How can citizens even bargain with a standard, take-it-or-leave-it form?"

The People's Terms of Service Agreement, instead, would be informed by consumers' desires as well as corporations'. It would be user-friendly. It would "use plain English, not legal jargon." It would be short enough for people to realistically be able to read it. Most of all, it would embrace five values: security, confidentiality, transparency, permanency, and respect for intellectual property.

Permanency: The contract cannot be unilaterally altered, period. This seemingly obvious rule, which applies to most contracts, has been undermined by technology companies that attempt to reserve the right to alter their terms of service without meaningful consent from users. A People's Terms of Service would require meaningful opt-in from users for any material changes. Users would also retain the right to have all their materials permanently deleted if they choose to leave the site, and that provision could never be altered.

Transparency: Companies promise to be transparent and provide meaningful notice to the individual regarding its collection, use, dissemination, and maintenance of personal information.

Intellectual Property: Companies respect the value of an individual's name or likeness and the copyrights of user information and work posted on the sites by taking minimal licenses for administrative use, or provide some profit-sharing for advertisements other commercial use of a user's name or likeness. (This is an important option for companies building a business model on monetizing user-generated content).

Confidentiality: Companies promise not to disclose personal information to third parties, unless users meaningfully opt-in to such disclosure for each party. (As always, they would still respond to government and legal requests.) Facebook itself makes a similar promise. To ensure protection, companies also promise to contractually ensure that recipients of personal information are obligated to respect the anonymity of any transferred data sets, and to provide users with control over data portability so it's easier to leave a given service.

Security: Companies promise to use appropriate and industry standard security safeguards protect all media against risks such as loss, unauthorized access or use, destruction, modification or unintended disclosure.

Those core ideas, the scholars say, are a starting point -- values that interested users and consumer advocates could debate and then, perhaps, draft into a model contract. The goal would be to leverage the force of collective action to counter the power enjoyed by digital behemoths. "The power of even a few million social network users, when coordinated," the authors write, "could push companies to offer more consumer rights as a good business decision." (The idea was inspired, in part, by recent class-action suits against Google and Instagram and Facebook -- the last of which accused the company of co-opting their identities in online ads. In response to that action, Facebook revised its "Statement of Rights and Responsibilities," in addition to offering the plaintiffs a $20 million settlement.)

And while the authors acknowledge that consumer power won't be easy to leverage -- you'd need an enormous community even to come close to matching Google's clout -- they believe people have to try. "We're finally moving past the simplistic notion," they argue, "that one-sided corporate agreements are an unavoidable 'cost' of using social media -- as if every company's corporate policy must be accepted as the automatic baseline." That's not how we regulate powerful companies like BP, they point out. "Why should our attitudes be more lax towards Google?"

About the Author

Most Popular

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

The new version of Apple’s signature media software is a mess. What are people with large MP3 libraries to do?

When the developer Erik Kemp designed the first metadata system for MP3s in 1996, he provided only three options for attaching text to the music. Every audio file could be labeled with only an artist, song name, and album title.

Kemp’s system has since been augmented and improved upon, but never replaced. Which makes sense: Like the web itself, his schema was shipped, good enough,and an improvement on the vacuum which preceded it. Those three big tags, as they’re called, work well with pop and rock written between 1960 and 1995. This didn’t prevent rampant mislabeling in the early days of the web, though, as anyone who remembers Napster can tell you. His system stumbles even more, though, when it needs to capture hip hop’s tradition of guest MCs or jazz’s vibrant culture of studio musicianship.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

Jim Gilmore joins the race, and the Republican field jockeys for spots in the August 6 debate in Cleveland.

After decades as the butt of countless jokes, it’s Cleveland’s turn to laugh: Seldom have so many powerful people been so desperate to get to the Forest City. There’s one week until the Republican Party’s first primary debate of the cycle on August 6, and now there’s a mad dash to get into the top 10 and qualify for the main event.

With former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore filing papers to run for president on July 29, there are now 17 “major” candidates vying for the GOP nomination, though that’s an awfully imprecise descriptor. It takes in candidates with lengthy experience and a good chance at the White House, like Scott Walker and Jeb Bush; at least one person who is polling well but is manifestly unserious, namely Donald Trump; and people with long experience but no chance at the White House, like Gilmore. Yet it also excludes other people with long experience but no chance at the White House, such as former IRS Commissioner Mark Everson.